Arriving in areas where variants of German were spoken, the Jews created their own language. This language preserved fragments of Hebrew— frequently in greatly modified form—and also elements of the vernaculars that had been brought along. It incorporated parts of the language of the coterritorial population, but the stock material was so transformed that it became indigenously Jewish. And when the major part of the Yiddish-speaking community moved many hundreds of miles away it took along the language, developed it, and later even transported it overseas. This scattered and dispersed handful was not swallowed by the majority, and thus for over a millennium a language was in the making, which must be considered—the reference here is to language itself, not its literature—among the highest achievements of the Jewish national genius.24
Weinreich was not alone in associating Jewish linguistic distinctiveness with national genius. In The Heroic Age of Franco-German Jewry (1969), Polish-born Irving Agus argued that the majority of twentieth-century Ashkenazic Jews descended from five to ten thousand extraordinarily resilient ancestors. “What were the special characteristics of these five to ten thousand persons,” he asks, “that enabled them to achieve such outstanding success in the struggle for existence? What natural qualities did they possess, what advantages of background and forms of inner organization, what special educational and cultural traditions that enabled them successfully to control their very difficult and very hostile environment and eventually to emerge as numerically the largest, culturally the most creative, and politically the most significant, branch of the Jewish people of the twentieth century?”25 For Agus, the “style of living, system of education, great brotherly devotion, and unusually progressive form of organization” of medieval Ashkenazi Jewry resulted from rigorous Darwinian-style selection in late antiquity and the early Middle Ages (second century B.C.E. to third century C.E. and fourth to eighth century C.E.).26 It is little wonder that when it came to language, he preferred to believe that the medieval French spoken by Jews in northern France was highly distinctive.27
Yiddish, considered by Weinreich one of “the highest achievements of the Jewish national genius,” was often stigmatized as a corrupt dialect of German and dismissed as a “jargon” by Jews and non-Jews alike.28 In 1699 Johann Christoph Wagenseil wrote, “The Jews have dealt with no language as ‘sinfully,’ as one says, as with our German language. They have given it a totally foreign intonation and pronunciation. They have mutilated good German words, they have tortured them, they have inverted their meaning as well as invented new words unknown to us. They have mixed innumerable Hebrew words and turns of phrase into German.”29 “What a German!” Friedrich Engels declared in the nineteenth century, referring in the same context to the “peddler Jews, their lice and their dirt.”30 For non-Jews opposed to Jewish emancipation in the nineteenth century, Yiddish epitomized the vulgarization that Jews would bring with them into society. For modernizing Jews, Yiddish was a barrier to greater social and cultural assimilation. Early on, Moses Mendelssohn’s (1729–1786) translations of books of the Bible into German and his writing of a modern commentary were central to the modernization effort.
Steven Aschheim describes in his book Brothers and Strangers how many Jews of western Europe viewed east European Jews as “culturally backward creatures of ugly and anachronistic ghettoes” and how this served as “a symbolic construct by which they could distinguish themselves from their less fortunate, unemancipated East European brethren.”31 Yiddish, stigmatized as a corrupted form of German, came to be associated by many west European Jews—many of them speakers of Yiddish themselves—with the purported degeneracy and backwardness of east European Jewish culture. In tsarist Russia, the Maskilim and Jewish intelligentsia embraced Hebrew and Russian, respectively, and although most knew Yiddish, they dismissed it as a jargon. “Only at the turn of the century,” David Fishman writes, “primarily under the influence of the Jewish labor movement and its political arm, the Bund, did a segment of the Jewish intelligentsia change its attitude towards Yiddish, and begin to view it as a valued cultural medium or as a national cultural treasure.”32 Regarding Jews hostile to Yiddish, Sander Gilman hypothesizes: “in order to deal with their real fear of being treated as a Jew, they accept the qualities ascribed by the reference group to their own language.”33
Without acknowledging the ideological underpinnings of his own position, Agus saw clearly that many of his predecessors had been driven by a desire to believe that “Rashi and his contemporaries were much more ‘modern’ than Polish-Russian Jews of the turn of the twentieth century.”34 Those Polish-Russian Jews were overwhelmingly speakers of Yiddish: in the 1897 census of the Russian Empire, which included the Polish provinces in the Pale of settlement, over 97 percent of Jewish respondents identified their daily language as Yiddish.35
It is against this backdrop that we must read Banitt’s arguments against the notion of a Judeo-French dialect. Banitt associates Yiddish with a long and dismal history of Jewish oppression, describing it as the language of Jews who lived “on the margins of Christian society,” “eternal refugees in their wretched ghettos and their ill-fated Judengassen.”36 He understands “Judeo-French” to mean substandard or deformed French.37 He calls D. S. Blondheim’s notion of Judeo-French (characterized especially by loanwords from Hebrew) “a sort of amorphous and heterogeneous language that does not even deserve the name ‘language,’ a koine, whose evolution across time and space seems indiscernible, one ‘Jewish dialect’ among so many others.”38 He continues:
Tout porte à croire … que les Juifs de France, avant leur expulsion à la fin du XIVe siècle, parlaient la langue, le dialecte et le patois de ceux au milieu desquels ils vivaient, et ne parlaient que cela: le caennnais à Caen, l’orléanais à Orléans, le troyen à Troyes, son patois bourguignon particulier à Brinon. Les formes picardes et les expressions provençales du champenois (ou lorrain) Colin Muset, les latinismes du Psautier de Metz, les formes provençales et les archaïsmes dans Aucassin et Nicolette, ont-ils jamais fait penser à quelqu’un que leurs auteurs parlaient une “langue vulgaire”, un charabia panaché?39
(Everything points to this: that the Jews of France, before their expulsion at the end of the fourteenth century, spoke the language, the dialect, and the patois of the people among whom they lived, and they spoke only that: the dialect of Caen in Caen, the dialect of Orleans in Orleans, the dialect of Troyes in Troyes, and in Brinon, its own special variety of Burgundian. The Picard features and the Provençal expressions of the Champenois (or Lorraine) [poet] Colin Muset, the Latinisms of the Metz Psalter, the Provencal elements and archaisms in Aucassin and Nicolette—did they ever make anyone think that their authors spoke a “vulgar tongue,” a motley gobbledygook?)
Banitt was not blind to the Hebrew borrowings in medieval Jewish texts in French, as his mention of regionalisms in other medieval French works indicates, but he objected to calling attention to them through the use of a special name, Judeo-French. This opinion is justifiable (though we must point out that speaking geographical dialects does not exclude the possibility of speaking them in distinctive ways). What shocks is the phrase “un charabia panaché” (motley gobbledygook) to describe a variety of French marked by Hebrew loanwords, archaisms, and other nonstandard elements. The implication is that Banitt saw Yiddish, too, as a “motley gobbledygook,” and that his stance on Jewish linguistic distinctiveness in medieval France (i.e., that there was none) was colored by his attitudes toward Yiddish.
“German Jews,” Aschheim writes, “were never able to forget that they shared a common border with the unemancipated Eastern ghetto masses,”40 a reality reinforced by Germany’s status as a destination and conduit for east European Jews migrating westward. Banitt was born in Antwerp, Belgium, but it is perhaps worth noting that two circumstances led to a highly visible east European Jewish presence there in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, which may or may not have influenced Banitt’s views: its status as a major gateway for east Europeans heading toward America and its thriving diamond industry. Simon Schwarzfuchs reports that in 1920–21, 23,656 emigrating Jews passed through Antwerp’s port and that from 1900 to 1939, its Jewish population increased almost sevenfold, from 8,000 to 55,000.41